If a couple of undergraduate pranks unearthed in Britain are
anything to go by, maybe it's just as well that Google's Australia
Day aerial photo opportunity didn't go to plan.

British media has been reporting a rash of rude and crude
sightings around the country both on Google Maps and the Microsoft
equivalent, Virtual Earth.

In the most recent discovery, a prank by two students from a
school near Southampton in the south of the country has just come
to light.

According to reports, the two unnamed year 11 students from the
all-male Bellemoor School used weed killer to etch an image of a
six metre-long phallus in the grass as an end-of-term joke.

Their handy work appears on Virtual Earth which, like Google
Maps, uses a combination of satellite and aerial imagery to allow
users to zoom down on landmarks from high up.

"This was an act of vandalism that took place during the summer
of 2005. Southampton city council reseeded the area and the grass
was regrown by the beginning of the new school term," a spokeswoman
from the school told the Press Association news agency.

The phallus is not visible on the Google Maps view of the area
as the photograph was taken at a different time.

This is the second British school to be blighted by a giant
phallus. In December, Google Earth watchers spotted a drawing of a
giant penis on the roof of Yarm School in Stockton-on-Tees.

There's also been a spate of rude word sightings. Earlier last
month, Google Maps spotters came across 20
metre-high letters in a field just north of Edinburgh in
Scotland spelling POO - possibly qualifying it as being the world's
first crap circle.

Other sightings include the words ARSE written in a field near
Rotherham and, in another field near Barnsley, the words EDDIE and
F---K (without the dashes) have been spelt out using hay bales.

Last week, Google alerted Sydneysiders that a chartered plane
would be flying over parts of the city at low altitude last Friday
and taking high resolution images of people below for inclusion on
the popular Google Maps and Google Earth services.

The idea was that people would get out and make themselves
visible and this would encourage more people to come back to the
mapping services when the images were eventually uploaded.

Many people took up the call and made large signs in parks and
beaches and along the the harbour foreshore.

Such an invitation opened up the exercise to being spammed with
pranks in the same league as those now being uncovered in
Britain.

Unfortunately for Google, Sydney air traffic control denied the
chartered plane permission to fly over parts of the inner city and
eastern suburbs because of commercial activity at Sydney
Airport.

However, the flight was able to capture images over the harbour
and the northern beaches and Bondi Beach.